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I’ve been away – but now I’m back

I’ve been missing from the blogging world for a few weeks but now I’m back.

At the beginning of September we had a family illness to deal with and things now look a lot better than they did nine weeks ago. So my focus has been somewhere else for a while.

However I haven’t been neglecting my family history research completely. I have been a subscriber to Ancestry for a long time but was becoming frustrated with not being able to find some entries in the 1901 census that I knew should be there. No matter what search criteria I used I couldn’t find any entries for my Dawson relatives in the village of Steeton with Eastburn, near Keighley, West Yorkshire. In fact I couldn’t find any entries at all for Steeton with Eastburn.

So I decided to buy a subscription to Find My Past. There were two reasons for this. One was to see if I had any better luck trying to find people living in Steeton with Eastburn. Second it gave me access to the 1911 census – I had been paying separately for this on the 1911 Census website and this was becoming expensive.

I was immediately rewarded. There it was – Steeton with Eastburn did exist in 1901 and there was a census!! I was able to fill in quite a few gaps in my information.

It seems that this whole village is missing from Ancestry.

I was then eager to start updating as much of my tree as I could with the 1911 census information. So over the past few weeks I have been trying to go through the primary names in my ancestry and systematically add the 1911 information and search for subsequent births, marriages and deaths. This work is ongoing.

I have to say that I was really excited at the prospect of using a new set of records from Find My Past. However I was also quite disappointed with the quality of some of the census transcriptions that I came across. I duly submitted corrections and they were quick to deal with these.

Don’t get me wrong here – I know how difficult it is to accurately transcribe handwriting especially if the document is not very clear and the location names are not known to the transciber. I discovered just how hard it was when I started transcribing for Family Search. But sometimes the correct information just seems so obvious. Anyway that’s my little rant out of the way.

As a result of all this my attention has been diverted from blogging – but I have kept up to date with some of my favourite bloggers and am glad to be back with you.

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One comment

Hi Mike, I also find some of the transcriptions on both ancestry, and find my past to be poor. And yes they are obvious when you actually look at them. I now subscribe to find my past, but do miss the user friendliness of ancestry. Just been looking at your George Hurtley information, about his death in France and added his date of death to my tree.
My wife Jan’s great grandfather, Marshall Craven died at Galipoli and 3 of his Craven cousins died in France in WW1. We always thought that Marshall died at the somme, so were surprised to find out where he actually died. We never had a photo of him, then last year when I was doing some research I found one in the yorkshire post from September 1915, repoting him missing. It is not good quality, but it is more than we ever had before.
Keep up the research.
Richard